Hutong Economics: This Old House

When the rainy season hit Beijing a couple of months ago, our house began to show its age. About four years old, to be precise.

My wife, Sarabeth, and I live in a one-story home in an alleyway about a mile or so north of the Forbidden City. At first glance, it has the distinctive features of the old city: gray brick walls, a frame made of rough-hewn wood logs, and a low-angled tile roof where magpies can settle and chatter in the afternoons. But look closely, and the mist of ye olde Beijing wafts away: the gray bricks are, in fact, concrete with lines drawn on them—and the tiles are the utilitarian slabs usually reserved for outhouses, rather than the iconic scalloped variety found on restored roofs in tonier alleys nearby. Our house, like others on the block, is old-esque, more shed than chateau, which is fine with us because, in real-estate-crazy Beijing, it’s one of the only plausible ways for financial mortals to remain in a hutong.

The first sign of trouble was a leaky spot in the hallway roof. After five years of hutong living, it was unremarkable; no ark required, nothing that a bath towel beneath the spot couldn’t fix. But one leak begat another and yet one more. Then the humidity spiked and three wooden doors that had shown some benign moldering around the bottom swelled beyond their frames and refused to close, or, more problematically, refused to open. Finally, a salad-plate sized chunk of plaster bubbled up from the living room wall and fell to the ground. It was time to call in Li Jizhong.

Li is the carpenter-electrician-plumber-contractor who was hired by the landlord four years ago for renovations, long before we moved in. Li is fortyish and affable and highly mobile. He crisscrosses Beijing on an electric bike that is held together with tape and loaded down with tool boxes and implements. He usually wears a double-breasted sport coat when he works, and he often arrives so soon after another gig that his brush cut is still dusted with plaster talc.

He sized up the job, and once he added a few other items to his list—broken lights, droopy bits of roof, and a patch of mold advancing like a Panzer front across the dining room wall—he eyeballed the price at four thousand five hundred yuan, or about seven hundred dollars. Some good-natured discussion knocked the price down a bit and he got to work with the most urgent problem: the doors. He unhinged the first one and laid it like a patient on the ground, studying it closely. “This won’t be easy,” he said—a phrase I’ve learned to expect from him frequently.

“There’s no obvious way to fix this except by building a new one,” he said. The door, like much of the house, looked at its best from a distance. Up close it was cheap plywood tacked on an even cheaper composite core.

“But since you made this one, can’t you make another?” I asked. He laughed.

“That was four years ago! Everything’s different now. Those tools are far away, the hardware is different, and, besides, the materials for building three doors will be much more expensive than when I bought it all in bulk.”

He had an alternative idea: he proposed tacking a large sheet of metal across the bottom of the door to stop the wood from swelling. I pictured the reaction I’d get when Sarabeth returned to find our doors reinforced with makeshift tin-plating. Instead, I asked why the doors were rotting in the first place after only four years. He laughed harder this time.

“When I renovated this house, the landlord only wanted to pay for materials that would last five years, because his lease—from the landlord above him—only lasts five years. So when it came to choosing the metal and the wood and the details, we only bought materials that would last for five years.”

In the spirit of Beijing these days, it had a certain logic. We often see houses in the neighborhood demolished and rebuilt in the course of a few weeks, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the lifetime of a house in terms of a few years. Chinese friends who are among the wave of new homeowners these days often complain that their buildings look decrepit after five years.

Americans who are weary of Washington dysfunction often remark, after a whirlwind visit to China, that the country seems to take a longer view of things by building new airports and highways and laying grand plans. That is true on the most high-profile projects, but that aphorism has always conformed more to our imagined notions of China than to the details of day-to-day life. Step closer, and China’s breakneck speed has its liabilities, whether it’s in the construction of a railway or a house in an alley.

After an afternoon of work, Li had tacked the door back together well enough to allow it to close, and we agreed to take another look at the mold in a month. In the meantime, he would try to come up with a fix, he said. After all, our lease only runs for another year.